South Africa has been on the forefront of crypto innovation and has produced one of the leading regulatory frameworks across the world. Since April 2024, over 300 crypto asset service providers have obtained a licence. VALR, which was among the first to obtain such a crypto licence in South Africa, also recently obtained an Over-the-Counter Derivatives Provider (ODP) licence from the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA). This enables VALR to provide a range of over-the-counter derivatives, including Contracts for Difference (CFDs), Quarterly and Perpetual Futures Contracts, Options, Forwards, and Swaps, all with crypto assets as the underlying. This marks one of the first occasions in South Africa that a financial service provider is licensed to offer these products with crypto assets as the underlying.
In 2025, VALR has made significant strides in growing its global user base to over 1.7 million registered users, with hundreds of thousands of monthly active users and tens of thousands daily. While the exchange has listed a considerable number of new crypto assets, with now more than 100 coins available for trade on the app across Simple Buy & Sell, Spot and Futures, USDT/ZAR, BTC/ZAR, and XRP/ZAR continue to be the most popular crypto pairs on VALR.
Over the course of the past seven years, VALR – in tandem with an increasingly sophisticated crypto industry – has moved well beyond its initial offering of exchange services only. In an effort to offer an ever more expansive suite of financial services, both catering to people’s everyday needs and institutions wishing to integrate with crypto, VALR now enables its customers to use the VALR app for payments at over 31,000 stores and 700,000 locations in South Africa. This is achieved through the app’s integration with Zapper, Scan-to-Pay, and Peach Payments. In addition, the VALR platform now also makes it easy for users to earn a yield on their savings through lending and staking.
Over the course of this year alone, VALR users were rewarded with over $1 million by using the platform. These rewards came from staking and lending, but also from airdrops, promotions, and trading competitions.
Farzam Ehsani, VALR’s Co-Founder and CEO, said: “We’ve worked to build a comprehensive platform that serves everyone – individuals and institutions alike. We’ve made our app and website simple enough for our grandparents to use, while making our API one of the most sophisticated in the market to allow corporate clients and institutions to plug into our liquidity, pricing, custody, and much more.”
Bridging Crypto and Traditional Finance Through RWAs
Highlighting the progressive integration of crypto and traditional finance, this year, globally, so-called real world assets (RWAs) have gained significant traction. In simple terms, RWAs are tokens issued on the blockchain that represent assets that do not natively live on a blockchain such as gold, stocks, or even real estate. One of the main benefits of this innovation is that it can significantly improve access to global or otherwise illiquid markets in terms of price exposure, for people all around the world who might have previously been structurally excluded, or at least hindered, from participating.
In line with this meaningful trend, in July of this year, VALR listed the Garrington Capital USD Private Credit Token (USDPC), Africa’s first such tokenised asset, enabling retail investors to gain exposure to the North American high-yield private credit market, an asset class previously unavailable to most individual investors. This was followed in September by VALR’s listing of xStocks, enabling its users to gain easy price exposure to U.S. stocks and index funds like Tesla, NVIDIA, Robinhood, Circle, Coinbase, Strategy, and the S&P 500. VALR was the first crypto exchange on the African continent to make this product available. This year also saw the launch of Crypto Bundles on VALR, making it easier for beginners in crypto to build a diversified crypto investment portfolio.
Badi Sudhakaran, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, noted: “Our innovations aim to serve the needs of customers at all levels, making finance fair and financial instruments accessible so everyone can confidently take control of their financial freedom and independence.”
